ExaTrend of the 2010s: Demographic Crunch

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Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:

DEMOGRAPHIC CRUNCH

Many developed nations will start hitting the wall in their ability to support their elderly. The contrast with the rapid growth of developing nations will bring into focus the turn in economic fortunes. The inevitable result is mass migration, licit or illicit.

See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:

ExaTrends of the Decade and Zeitgeist for 2011:

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ExaTrend of the 2010s: Culture Jamming

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Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:

CULTURE JAMMING

Remix culture will surge, with everybody taking and jamming up slices of everything and anything to express themselves, while intellectual property law fails to keep pace. Every culture on the planet will reach everywhere – the only culture we will know is a global mashed-up emergent culture that changes by the minute.

See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:

ExaTrends of the Decade and Zeitgeist for 2011:

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5 central facets of media and PR in China

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Last month I gave the keynote at Ketchum’s Global Media Network meeting in New York on The Future of Global Media. Immediately after my keynote I participated in a panel on media in the BRIC countries. The other panellists were Ketchum executives from Brazil, Russia, and India. Since their China team were kept at home with client commitments I stood in to talk about China, given my background in the region. Details on the keynote and panel are here.

Here are notes I made to prepare for the panel session, where we were asked to share 5 key issues about the media landscape in our country.

0. Asia and China encompass very diverse media markets.

Across Asia media markets take very different shapes. The largest market by revenue is Japan, which is very different from Western developed economies, notably in the size and resilience of the newspaper market, and the depth of penetration of mobile internet. Hong Kong and Taiwan have very distinct markets from mainland China, both being more similar structurally and in terms of media relations to Western countries. The massive mainland China market itself has significantly different characteristics at the national, metropolitan, regional and local levels.

The following points relate to the mainland China (P.R.C.) media market.

1. Newspaper and broadcast markets are growing rapidly.

As many more people shift to higher socio-economic brackets and literacy increases, newspaper readership and broadcast TV audiences are rapidly developing. China is already the largest newspaper market in the world, and TV and radio advertising revenue is growing at a double-digit pace. There is still substantial scope for sustained growth in these traditional media markets.

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The boundaries of crowdsourcing and how it relates to open innovation

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I was recently asked to do an interview for the Turkish version of CNBC eBusiness magazine on crowdsourcing. I’m not sure whether the article will appear online – I’ll share it if so. In any case here are the answers I gave the interviewer:

1) The term “crowdsourcing” first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wire Magazine article. Does “crowdsourcing” is a new way of saying “open innovation”? Do these two terms have the same meaning? Or does crowdsourcing differs from open innovation?

Crowdsourcing and open innovation are related but distinct concepts. Crowdsourcing covers many approaches, which I summarize as ‘tapping the minds of many’. These can include service marketplaces, competition platforms, idea platforms, and prediction markets. In fact, all of these approaches can be applied inside organizations as well as externally, helping to tap some of the ‘cognitive surplus’ of employees. Open innovation is about looking outside the organization for new ideas and products, in what can be any number of ways. Often this is done on crowdsourcing platforms, but sometimes, as Procter & Gamble does, it is largely about seeking the best existing unexploited products in the market and adapting them for its own marketing pipeline.

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How do you make talent shine in a world of distributed work?

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I caught up for a beer with old friend Tom Stewart, currently Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer at Booz & Co, when he was in Sydney recently. We chatted about interesting topics such as business cycles, talent, and where media is going.

Afterwards Tom wrote a great article titled Why There’s No Such Thing as a Talent War reflecting on some of our conversation and his other meetings in Australia, where attracting and retaining talent is top of mind for many corporate executives.

I had told Tom my thoughts on the global talent economy: in a world in which knowledge workers can work anywhere, the most talented can pick and choose choose who they work for – on projects or sometimes in long-term employment.

Critically, the work choices the most talented make are rarely about money, but more often about how interesting the projects are, who they will work with, and how enjoyable it is working with their client.

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Further explanation and answers to 6 questions on the Newspaper Extinction Timeline after one million views

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Well the Newspaper Extinction Timeline we launched a couple of weeks ago has certainly made an impression. Given the 50,000 views we’ve had on my blog alone, plus the extensive uptake by mainstream media around the world (a partial list at the bottom of this post) it’s a pretty safe estimate that it has been seen over one million times so far. Some of our other visuals such as our Web 2.0 Framework and Future of Media Strategic Framework have had well over 500,000 views, but the Newspaper Extinction Timeline has quickly transcended these.

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Click on image to download full framework

The framework has attracted both brickbats and bouquets. However it has been significantly misunderstood, so it’s worth going into some further explanations and clarifications.

Why so specific?

I expect the Newspaper Extinction Timeline to be wrong in the detail. While we think it’s likely to be mainly right I would be amazed if we get much precisely right. That is because the future is inherently unpredictable. We’re not trying to pretend that it isn’t, and that’s why for long-term strategy projects we favor scenario planning as a tool to identify and acknowledge the full scope of uncertainty. However as I noted earlier, precise forecasts can help people to engage with ideas, and hopefully move them to action. The key intentions of the timeline were to bring to life the shift from news-on-paper and the diversity of global media markets.

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BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) plus Indonesia are where internet and mobile are exploding

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Doyen of internet analysis Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has provided some great data and insights in her presentation at Web 2.0 today. She has framed it around 10 questions Internet executives should ask themselves (and answer). The full deck is well worth going through – I have put that at the bottom of the post – but I wanted to highlight a couple of her slides on globalization of the internet and mobile.

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Almost half of the people in the world using the internet are in five countries: the US plus the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China). The US is close to full penetration, though there is still a little further to go, and the pace of growth in Brazil is slow despite only being at 39% penetration – this is likely to increase. Where there is undoubtedly extraordinary potential for growth is in China, where internet usage is soaring, and India, where growth hasn’t yet started to properly ramp up. Russia, while not as populous as its neighbors, still has plenty of scope of growth. In short, these five countries will soon account for significantly more than half of the world’s internet population.

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The variety of connection speeds around the world – it matters!

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I’ve written several times about internet bandwidth across countries and why it matters, including some interesting research back in 2007 correlating time spent on PCs with bandwidth and a more recent post on bandwidth and economic growth.

Now Royal Pingdom has compiled a nice list of real connection speeds in countries around the world, using the largest content delivery network, Akamai, as the source, making this probably the most reliable data available. Here is the list below.

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Source: Royal Pingdom

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Gulf News: interview on the path forward for newspapers

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Today’s Media & Marketing section of the Gulf News, the largest English-speaking newspaper in the region, published our Newspaper Extinction Timeline and a brief interview with me, which is below in the print version, and also in text at the bottom of the post. In the interview I emphasise the opportunities on the other side of the challenges for those that can meet them.

The latest figures I have seen for Gulf News show audited circulation up 34% in the 3 years to March 2009. The date for U.A.E. in my timeline is 2030, which reflects issues including the affluence of the country, pronounced wealth polarization, good urban bandwidth, strong urbanisation, and absolute size of the economy.

Interview on Newspaper Extinction Timeline in Gulf News

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Keynote on the Future of Global Media in New York

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After Future of Crowdsourcing Summit in San Francisco next week I will be heading on to New York, where among other things I will be at the Ketchum Global Media Network meeting where I will do the keynote and participate in a panel on the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) media landscapes.

Here is the description of my keynote:

The Future of Global Media

Until now media markets have been fairly similar across nations. Today we are seeing a massive divergence in media structures around the world. While some fundamental drivers of change such as social networks and the extraordinary rise of mobile media are prominent everywhere, these and other forces are playing out very differently across East and West, old and new economies. Across all markets, the structures for how news and content are created and become visible are rapidly evolving. The implications for corporate marketers include new perspectives on global campaigns, and the potential to tap into a vast lattice of existing and new channels to reach customers.

And here are full details on the event (also see the event website)

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